"Increase theta-2 to 0.34," Ritsuko ordered. Maya gave a word of assent, and typed the command into her terminal.

The three pilots were in the freshly-restored Pribnow Box, running a gruelling sim of Misato's design, featuring concurrent attacks by a mixture of hostile Eva units and past Angels. At present, Asuka was dancing out of the grasp of the fourth Angel's energy whips, while Shinji and Rei were trading blows with a green production Eva formally called Unit Minus One but which was universally nicknamed the Evabot. Ritsuko, who was in charge of the enemy AI, was cheating outrageously, with Misato's blessing. The Angel had been redesigned to have an extra two whips, longer than the originals had been; meanwhile, the evil Eva was operating with an effective synchronisation rate of almost 200%, didn't need a power cable, and had extra armour plates with no weight penalty. The simulated battle was inside Tokyo-3, so the bridge crew were operating the dynamic battlefield to the pilots' advantage, but Ritsuko also had the power to disable individual subsystems, and the various armour plates and weapon relays failed one after another. On paper, this was to determine which systems were most critical, and to train the pilots to be able to keep fighting when they failed; in practice, Ritsuko was enjoying herself more than she had in weeks.

This was the sixth such exercise; they had been defeated in two of the previous five. Asuka had thrown a tantrum when they lost the first match, in which they had been pitted against an enemy Eva and the sixth, except the fishlike Angel was allowed to fly; Misato vetoed that scenario after it single-handedly crushed all three defenders before the Evabot even reached the city. They had lost the third match, too, when the tenth had flattened them all just after Asuka took out the fifth; Asuka demanded they stop using the orbital Angel until Misato could 'come up with a way to kill it that isn't stone-cold retarded'.

The sim had therefore grown more balanced each time, and was by now reasonably even. Asuka, who refused to do worse than Shinji had in real life, had the sense to stay out of range of the Angel's whips until an opening presented itself; with Ritsuko sabotaging the city around them, this was taking longer than she'd expected. Meanwhile, Shinji grappled with the green Eva, rolling over apartment blocks and museums, while Rei trained a pallet gun on them both. The Evabot was stronger, but whenever it got the upper hand, Rei would spray it with bullets.

"Battery D! Hit it!" Asuka shouted.

"That one began knocked out," Ritsuko observed. She idly rerouted a side-arm rising for Asuka to instead come up on the opposite end of the city, kilometres away from anyone. "The third threw Unit-00 into it during the last battle, I think." They allowed only partial repairs between simulations.

"Asuka, the weapons lift's failed," Shigeru reported. "I'm trying again, but these will take a minute." He typed commands, and four more guns began rising through separate weapons shafts. Ritsuko gave it a moment's thought and decided to make one of the lifts 'randomly' explode just before the guns reached the surface.

Asuka hissed as a whip grazed her abdominal armour plate, and skipped backward, out of range of the follow-through. She jabbed with her glaive, forcing the Angel to waft backward.

There was a buzz at Ritsuko's hip. She glanced down at her phone; it was an automated message from the Magi. She checked it.

Code A+

She blanched.

"Maya, handle this," she ordered, and swept from the room.

"Senpai?" Maya asked, panicked. It took two people to run their role effectively: one to predict what the heroes were going to do and how to complicate it, and one to enter the actual commands.

"Okay, screw this," said Asuka, as her opponent sliced through a skyscraper she'd spent the past twenty seconds manoeuvring it behind. "Wondergirl, tag in here."

Maya dithered for a moment, before sending a jam signal to Asuka's umbilical cable, making it catch on a power line that hadn't been there a moment before. Rei turned and opened up on the Angel, making it flinch. Asuka simply jettisoned her cable and sprinted toward Shinji. The Evabot got the upper hand and pulled its prog knife on him; Asuka twirled her glaive and sliced through its wrist, then its neck.

"Come on, Third!" she cried, turning back to the Angel, which was advancing through Rei's barrage. Unconsciously, her mouth had turned up into the toothy grin she always wore while fighting and winning. "Hurry up! Go right!"

Maya simply couldn't match their speed. Asuka vaulted over an armoured shelf and around two energy whips; between that and Rei throwing her empty gun and two nearby cars, the Angel and Maya were too distracted to notice Shinji until he grabbed it from behind and stabbed at it with his prog knife. Asuka seized the opportunity to deliver a vicious double strike with her glaive; Shinji barely yanked his hand out of the way.

"Ha," she said, as the Angel fell silent and the simulation ended. "What happened at the end? Couldn't keep up, or just felt like fighting fair for a … hey, where's Akagi gone?"

The scientist was in fact in an elevator, heading a long way down. When she reached her destination, she had to type a 22-character passcode including six Unicode characters, and give thumb and retinal scans.

Through the armoured door was an extensive laboratory. Inside a locked cabinet, visible from multiple hidden cameras, lay a small block of hardened transparent Bakelite. Inside it was Adam.

There was a hairline crack in the plastic.

She flipped open her phone. "Commander? We have a situation."

…

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Rebellion

…

Rei methodically rinsed the LCL from her hair and body, watching with mathematical interest the rivulets it formed on her skin and eddies around her feet before draining to Nerv's treatment and sewage systems. Every time she showered, she followed the same sequence of actions, stood in the same position, set the water pressure to the same level, and yet each time the water traced subtly different routes along her body to the drain.

It occurred to her that the plumbing was less predictable than her. She wasn't sure what to think about this.

The Second Child finished her shower after Rei. She was obviously exhausted from the sims, judging by how little she was complaining. She barely spared Rei a glance before they left the showers, and said nothing when they and Shinji met Misato in the debriefing room.

"That was pretty good for a first time," Misato began.

"'Pretty good'?" Asuka repeated, indignant. "We beat two Angels attacking at once almost every time, even while that cow literally defied the laws of physics around us."

"With three fully functional Evas, when you already knew the Angels' strengths and weaknesses and workable counterplans," Misato continued without missing a beat. Asuka opened her mouth to say something cutting about the 'workable' part; Misato cut her off. "You know perfectly well that most of the setbacks we've faced in the field have been caused by Angels displaying unexpected new abilities, and that you've only fought two out of eight with all three Evas. You also got at least one Eva trashed in most of those sims. So yes, pretty good for a first time.

"Individually, you're performing as well as could be expected, given how much training you've each done." Asuka stood a little straighter; Shinji shrugged a little; Rei was still. "But you're not working together to the best of your ability. You split up and consistently got in one another's way when you tried to fight the one target. There was only one part where you really meshed, when Asuka and Shinji fought the seventh like you did the first time, but as soon as that was destroyed you began interfering with one another again."

Asuka glared at Shinji, because he had in fact accidentally shot her in the back immediately after it went down, when she darted out from behind a skyscraper at the third Angel; it was an unlucky hit directly where the entry plug would be, and she was instantly 'killed' and left to scream imprecations from her darkened plug for the rest of the battle.

"You're not going to make all three of us learn a dance routine now, are you?" he asked, with nervous glances at Asuka and then Rei.

Misato shook her head. "No. We used that specific tactic because that Angel regenerated unless identical damage was dealt to both cores in unison. It's too inflexible otherwise."

"Well, then, how am I supposed to work with these idiots shooting at me?" Asuka asked.

Misato smiled and shrugged. "No idea. Today was a test run; the crew and I will spend the next few days working out exercises to help. We'll start on them next week. You're dismissed for the day."

"Are you driving us back home?" Shinji asked.

Misato shook her head again. "The Commander's just flown off to America for another budget meeting; I have a triple shift. With no notice," she added, irritated. "You'll have to look after yourselves tonight."

"However will we manage," Asuka undertoned, as they turned and left.

Subjectively, they had fought eight Angels (not the eleventh, which the Commander had ordered kept secret from everyone up to and including the pilots, and which had been entirely erased from Magi's memory banks), most of them repeatedly, and six enemy Eva units over the past hour; each of them had been disabled at least three times. They were exhausted. Rei didn't even notice that she'd missed her street until they were a block past it.

"Ayanami …" Shinji began. Rei stopped and turned back to him.

"What is it?"

"Well …" he replied.

There was a longish pause. Asuka, who was in the lead as usual, turned around, rolled her eyes with impatience, and began tapping her foot, but said nothing. Rei turned back to her street.

"When Misato wanted me and Asuka to synchronise to fight the seventh Angel, she had us live together," Shinji blurted out. "And, um. It wasn't. All that. Bad. Mostly. Do you want to spend tonight with us? At our place?"

"Where's she going to sleep?" Asuka asked before Rei could say anything.

"Misato's room," he said. "I could clean it up a bit first."

"Did she say you could do that?" she pressed.

"I could call her now," he said, fumbling for his phone. "Or I could sleep on the floor. I'll cook dinner for all three of us, and we can watch movies or something. I – I mean, if we're pilots, we should spend more time together, right? It was nice when we went out for ramen last month. And it's no trouble for me, none at all!"

Rei was silent for a time. "I should go," she said at last, and set off back for her own apartment.

"Oh," Shinji said, dejected. He turned back to Asuka; her hair whipped around as she turned and began walking again.

"Come on, Third!"

Their work for Nerv detracted from the pilots' schoolwork in two major ways. The more obvious one was when they missed classes while convalescing after battles; this included Asuka's unilateral declaration of one day off after every battle. The second was that, even when no Angels had attacked for four weeks, the endless synch tests and training sessions left them physically and emotionally drained at the end of the day. They simply had no energy left to do their homework properly. Most days, Shinji would just curl up with his SDAT, and Asuka would switch off in front of the TV, safe in the rationalisation that their homework was largely pointless busywork anyway, and that Nerv forbade the teacher from assigning detentions that could interfere with training.

"Hey, Shinji," she said, settling down before the TV. "Get me something to eat. I'm starving."

He glanced at her, then at a pack of chips sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter.

"Not junk food." She raised an arm, possibly trying to show off how slim she was, but actually drawing her sleeve up in a way that gave Shinji an eyeful of side boob. He turned pink but didn't look away, glad that she couldn't see him from this angle. "Proper food. I don't want to get fat like Akagi. Besides, I don't like the taste of that kind."

"O-okay," he said. He could've sworn Asuka had specifically asked for that brand of chips, and he definitely wouldn't call Akagi fat. Still, if she asked him to make her something, he'd do it.

It took him only a few minutes to fix her a platter of sushi, but it was long enough for her to curl up asleep on the seat. He set the plate down and studied her for a moment, weighing up the potential beatings from disturbing her when she was sleeping against the potential beatings of not telling her when her food was ready.

He knew she sometimes sleepwalked while dreaming, but now, when she'd just drifted off, before her dreams started, she was perfectly still. Her face, so often contorted into smirks, glares, and pouts, smoothed out, the tics that she tried to hide under her temper gone. Her hair flopped over her body like cat's fur, and he had a mad urge to stroke it, although his sense of self-preservation stopped him. Instead, he tried to work out which part of her he could touch without her accusing him of being a pervert, and settled on shaking her foot.

"Hmm?" she mewed, and cleared her throat.

"I made you sushi," Shinji said, offering her a piece.

She ate it without comment and seemed to revive a little, although not to her full liveliness. "Why were you touching my foot, you pervert?"

A swing and a miss. At least she didn't hit him this time. "You were asleep."

She took another mouthful and a moment to think. "That doesn't – you know what, never mind. I wasn't sleeping. I was just resting my eyes. It's not like there's anything good on TV anyway." She made no move to mute it, though.

"It's a shame Ayanami couldn't come," he mused.

"What do you see in her, anyway?" Asuka asked. "She's probably the most boring person I know."

"Didn't you ask her to eat with us, you know, after we fought the tenth Angel?" asked Shinji.

She shrugged.

"I guess I just like seeing her smile," he said.

Asuka frowned. "But that's just that you're a sap," she said. "You couldn't stand being around anyone more depressed than yourself."

"I'm not depressed," he said.

She chose to let that one pass. "I mean, you hang out with those two idiots instead of her when you have the choice."

For some reason, his life seemed to place him in trios a lot. He was one of three pilots, and one of three housemates, not counting Pen-Pen. Right now, though, Asuka presumably was referring to Toji and Kensuke. Shinji could think of no response to this beyond a shrug.

Asuka smirked in triumph. "Let's watch a movie," she decided, and popped another piece of sushi into her mouth. "You pick."

He blinked. She never let him pick. No-one ever let him pick. He had no idea how to go about doing something like that; what if she didn't like it? "I'm fine with anything."

She harrumphed and rolled her eyes. "I'm too tired to decide now," she said. "Just choose something we haven't seen which isn't too bad."

"If we haven't seen it, how do I know whether it's good?"

She just glared at him, so he scurried over to the TV and checked its program log. It was a semi-modern model which recorded broadcasts for up to a week; in exchange, there was a hardware lock to keep people from skipping over the ads. Given the population decline and cultural disruptions following Second Impact, very little in the way of cinema had been produced in his lifetime, most of it propaganda and very dull; the only real candidates were badly dubbed pre-Impact American movies. He chose one called Labyrinth because it had a colourful thumbnail, and they settled in.

…

Six holographic lights turned on in the Commander's private jet. Five of them illuminated five of the world's most powerful men; one of them illuminated two.

"Ikari," said the man with the green background. "I hear you've been training your pilots to fight other Eva units. What is the meaning of this?"

Ikari remained stock-still. When dealing with people like those on the Human Instrumentality Committee, one could never show any nervous tics. Likewise, Fuyutsuki never moved. He did note, though, that the Committee had found out about Misato's new program remarkably quickly. "After the third Angel, we attempted to optimise our tactics against similar targets. Consequently, we used inappropriate strategies and suffered extreme damage – and repair bills – in the following battles, and so discontinued the practice. Now, though, we've faced enough variety of Angels to attempt it again, but we run the risk of similar catastrophe unless we use all known Angelic forms."

"Between the first, second, third, and seventh Angels, I should have thought your pilots would have ample opportunities to train against humanoid enemies," observed the man with the yellow background. "Are you sure you're not preparing to fight a different opponent altogether?"

"The first and second Angels are not appropriate for use in a training program," Ikari replied. "It was over-training against the third that led to critical injuries and near defeat by the fourth and fifth, and the seventh was … idiosyncratic. I am preparing Nerv for the remaining Angels as best I can, in accordance with your wishes."

"What guarantee of that do we have?" asked Yellow.

"Adam."

"What about him?" Red asked suspiciously. "He is dormant, harmless."

"You shouldn't even have him," Green said unpleasantly. "He should still be in our possession. You know perfectly well that this is unacceptable to the Committee."

"The Chairman himself gave the order for Adam to be shipped here," Ikari said.

This was technically true. Ikari had raised the option in a full Seele meeting, pointing out to the rest of the organisation that it would be catastrophic if an Angel reached either Adam or Lilith, and that it would therefore be logical to concentrate all vulnerabilities and forces in one location. As moving Lilith would be rather less practical, it followed that Adam and the third complete Eva should both be transported to Tokyo-3 and placed under Nerv's command. This was such common sense that the Committee couldn't think of a reason to refuse on the spot without revealing their own plans to the rest of Seele, and Kihl had had to pretend it was his idea. Everyone present knew that Kihl had ordered the power sabotage in retaliation and was planning to steal Adam back at a later date, and almost certainly to murder Ikari; the only real question was which man had pre-empted more of the other's counterplans. Naturally, the other four Seele men present each had contingency plans for either outcome, and would deny this if asked.

"And now, Adam is escaping his Bakelite prison," Ikari continued, before the Committee could descend into childish bickering over who manipulated whom into allowing what to be stolen when. "The Scenario cannot proceed as planned if he is allowed to regenerate. Nerv therefore requires the data on his former containment protocols."

"So, return him to Germany, and Seele will protect him, as we did for the past fifteen years," said Red.

"Is it really necessary to leave Nerv unattended to discuss this?" asked Blue.

"It is required to sell certain illusions to my inferiors, yes," Ikari said, a smirk threatening to break out behind his gloved hands. He quashed it. "And what shall the Committee tell the rest of Seele when they ask why we have divided our forces needlessly?"

"Why not tell them the truth?" Yellow suggested ironically. "That we do not trust you?"

"If you believe there is a better man for the job, then I propose you have me removed and make him Commander of Nerv in my place," Ikari said. This came across as almost flippant, because of how infeasible it was. "After all, it hardly matters to Seele's scenario whether an Angel reaches one Seed or both."

The way these negotiations worked, the Committee was ultimately going to give him something – they certainly couldn't allow Adam to go unchecked – but it would have strings attached and probably only be a temporary solution. They would never trust him if they didn't have apocalyptic leverage; and the alarming thing was that if their Scenario didn't go as planned, they probably would initiate Third Impact, just to spite him. This was all accounted for, though. Lurking just beyond the circle of light used for Ikari's receiver was a charming man with stubble.

…

"If we use a Kolmogorov-Poisson prior, we can define a probability distribution over hypothesis space," Ritsuko explained, scribbling some equations on a board while Maya watched, her eyes slowly widening as she realised how far over her head it was. "We then sample from that, allowing Magi to invent new Angels for the simulations. We'd be able to train the pilots to deal with unpredictable enemies, rather than just rehashing old battles over and over."

"Could … we use that to predict future Angels?" Maya asked, playing for time while she tried to parse out the maths.

"Unlikely," Ritsuko said, turning back to the board to check for errors or inspiration. "Hypothesis space is too broad; I estimate there are at least millions of relatively plausible forms, and that's assuming that …"

She trailed off, hearing a rhythmic crashing sound. She frowned and looked out into the corridor, her protégée trailing behind her.

Misato was kicking a vending machine; it was already rather heavily dented. "The entire city is run by not one but three genius supercomputers that can coordinate two million workers," she wailed, "thirty thousand soldiers, and three giant robots that shoot forcefields and swim through lava, but they can't even run a friggin' vending machine?"

Ritsuko watched impassively, giving a solid impersonation of Rei. Maya ducked back into the office.

"Gods! I kill gods! It's my job! It's what I do! We've destroyed monsters that entire civilisations couldn't even scratch! Not just once, but again and again! And yet we can't … even …"

Maya appeared again, mutely offering a can of coffee. Misato took one look at it and began sobbing.

Ritsuko strode forward and plucked it out of Maya's hands. "Misato, how long have you been on shift now?" she asked.

Misato sniffled. "I don't … since this morning?"

Ritsuko checked her phone's clock. "That would be since yesterday morning," she corrected. "I seem to recall you've been doing double shifts for most of this week, with no days off. That would put you at, oh, about a hundred hours here over the last week?"

"With the reinforcements to the UN deployments, I've had to supervise everything," Misato said. "And … and they're all so stupid … there was this one man, who wanted to put thirty-five tanks in the main plazas … and …"

"Misato, get some rest," said Ritsuko. "You need sleep. You can't work effectively if you're dead on your feet, and just running on caffeine is going to kill you."

Her phone buzzed. Another message from Magi: Blue pattern detected.

She placed the coffee back in Misato's hands.

…

"Hey! Shinji! Wake up!"

Shinji blinked in disorientation for a moment, before a hand grabbed his shoulder and rattled him awake. "Ow! I'm awake! Let go! Asuka!"

"Well? Get up!"

He squinted as she switched on his light. "What time is it?" It was pitch black outside.

"Never mind that now. They've found another Angel."

And with that, he was fully awake. "What? Here? Why haven't the sirens gone off?"

"They want to keep the roads clear so we can deploy faster. Come on!"

She pulled him to his feet and toward the door.

"Wait, let me get dressed –"

"You'll be wearing a plugsuit, idiot," she said, slipping on her sandals.

"But you're –"

She was dressed in a rather nice dark grey skirt and a white button-up shirt with a neckerchief, and her hair was combed and tied in a ponytail. He was in his nightclothes.

"That's because I actually had my phone with me, because pilots are supposed to be on standby! What's your excuse? And put your shoes on!"

He didn't have a power socket in his room, because she had kicked him out when she arrived and forced him into a smaller one; he therefore left his phone in the living room to charge at night. Also, he slept with his SDAT headphones in his ears, which tended to mute external sounds. Before he could explain all this, she grabbed him again and pulled him out the door.

A pair of Section Two goons with a black van were waiting for them at the base of the apartment complex; with minimal chatter, they drove the pilots to a monorail station. Moments later, their tram was descending into the Geofront, bypassing all checkpoints and heading directly to the cages; and the Angel sirens went off.

Shinji looked despondently at his feet. One of his shoes had fallen off when Asuka dragged him out of their apartment; he couldn't decide whether to keep wearing this one and be off-balance or to take it off and be completely barefoot but risk losing it. Asuka rolled her eyes at this, her phone to her ear.

"Attacking at two in the morning is just rude," she fumed.

"You don't need to tell me," Misato replied from Central Dogma. Around her, Ritsuko and Maya were querying Magi, commanding a team of junior techs. "We have about five hours before it reaches Tokyo-3, but we'll minimise collateral damage if we engage it further away."

"Wasn't that what you said about the seventh?" Asuka asked.

"Would you have preferred the UN dropped that N2 mine on top of the city?" Misato asked. "Try not to lose this time."

"Hey! The way I remember it, we beat that thing!" But Misato had already hung up. "You –" She rounded on Shinji. "Take that thing off, you look like an idiot!"

Minutes later, the three pilots were properly dressed and inserted into their Evas. Misato opened a broadcast to them all. "The target has just made landfall," she said. "Here's a live video feed."

It was actually six screens from multiple angles, a few kilometres east of the crater the N2 mine had left after their first battle with the seventh. The beach was turned to day by high-power plasma lamps from hovering VTOLs; they could make out flight lights of UN ground-attack aircraft circling above, awaiting their orders. A single gargantuan hand ending with disproportionately long claws was sunk deep into the sand; an emaciated forearm, elbow, and half an upper arm trailed into the water. Its skin was mostly white, with asymmetric patches and whorls of grey and brown. Great clouds of steam billowed up around it. As they watched, a second hand broke out of the ocean and settled on the shore, and then its head appeared. The best description Shinji could think of was that it was shaped like a cat's head, except without ears, whiskers, or any other fur, and there was a wide black smear where its eyes would have been, like it was covered in soot. As though to show it off, the steam swirled and flowed away from it.

"Ugly sucker," Asuka observed. Shinji rather agreed with her.

"Brace," Misato said, and launched their catapults. "You'll arrive at the airport and be flown over. We're going to airdrop you as soon as possible. Rei, you're designated exclusively for neutralising its AT Field. Shinji, you'll have a pallet gun. Asuka, your sonic glaive. When Rei gives the signal, Shinji will open up on it. While it's distracted and taking damage, Asuka will charge and finish it off."

"Try not to shoot me this time, idiot," Asuka added quietly.

On their screens, a third hand pulled out of the water, and a fourth, each throwing out more steam. The Angel's upper shoulders were positioned higher than its head; the one on its right was further forward. A bright red crystal sat where its Adam's apple would have been. Its torso was covered in criss-crossing ridges, through which seawater sluiced back out to sea. It pulled itself forward, revealing three more arms, narrow, flat hips, and then finally its knees. It was crawling; with so many long, thin limbs, it evoked a spider dragging a large piece of prey. Each arm was as long as an Eva, although they were bent so the shoulders were at maybe two thirds that height.

"That's … a lot of arms," Shinji observed nervously. "Three on the left, four on the right."

"But look how slow it is," Asuka said, excited. "It's a sitting target."

Their Evas arrived at the surface. Air force crews were waiting for them; they strapped themselves into cargo bays, removed their power cables, and disabled main Eva functionality. Moments later, they were in the air.

"Does the Angel possess any ranged attacks?" Rei asked.

"Bad memories, eh, First?" Asuka baited.

Rei's eyes flicked to the Second Child's hologram, then back to Misato's. Her expression and tone remained constant. Responding to Asuka was beneath her. Asuka scowled.

"Most of the setbacks we've faced in the field so far have been caused by Angels displaying new abilities," Rei pressed.

Misato blinked. That was an almost exact quote of her own words, mere hours earlier. Rei had actually pointed out a tactical oversight. She had a sudden mental image of this Angel displaying a particle beam like the fifth's and destroying all three Evas while they were still in the air. She really needed sleep. "I'll order the UN forces to attempt a preliminary bombardment, to coax out its AT Field and any attacks it might have," she promised. "Someone, get me Maj-Gen Reichner, now!"

The Angel's legs ended in what might have been a very poor sculptor's attempt to make human feet. They dragged along the ground, digging twin furrows bordered by piles of wet sand. As they watched, one of its forward hands landed on an old house; without warning or visible source, the house burst into flames.

"The target's surface temperature is approximately three hundred degrees," reported Maya, reading from a thermal camera. "There's a constant high-energy reaction, dissipating in the form of heat."

"Right," Asuka said, her enthusiasm fading very slightly. "Note to self: don't let it touch me."

Although really, in all honesty, the fact that it could fight back just made it more exciting. After all, executing some toddler of an Angel that couldn't even stand up straight would be beneath her.

"Major?" said Makoto. "Reichner's refusing to engage."

Misato growled. This was like that time on the Over the Rainbow, except worse. Her rank was only a field officer; there was a special UN directive that, in case of Angelic attack, gave her authority over almost everyone on Earth except Ikari Gendo, but general officers never listened to that. She snatched the phone from Makoto. "Major-General, Nerv ranks everyone when an Angel's attacking."

"I don't care if you're the Pope," Reichner replied. He had a strong German accent. "I don't care if you're God Almighty. Between the first one and that flying diamond, my men got slaughtered for no reason at all. You think those robots are the only things that can hurt them? You can damn well use them then."

"They are. And that means we're all going to die if they get taken out by a surprise attack."

"What, so my men are expendable to you?"

"Aren't you a soldier?"

"There's a difference between launching an attack where you know some of your men will die but you will take an enemy position, and launching one where they'll die without even scratching its paint job."

"You will make a difference. Sneak attacks are the Angels' deadliest weapons. If you can flush them out, it could save an Eva. We only have three of them."

"You guarantee it's necessary?"

"I'm a soldier too, Lieutenant-General. I don't sacrifice troops when I don't have to."

He hung up.

"The order's gone through," Misato said. "Let's see how it likes high explosives."

The camera plane manoeuvred to in front of the Angel, keeping a safe distance, and swivelled left. Eight UN light bombers were angling into position; they dived, each releasing a payload at the nadir of their descent before turning sharply upward. The eight pairs of bombs slammed into walls of shimmering orange light and exploded. A moment later, the Angel's head turned to track them; its eye sockets flashed eight times, and the aircraft burst into flames one by one.

"Call off the attack!" Misato ordered into her phone. "It can see you; and don't provoke it into taking out the spy planes or the dropships. Ritz, have Magi compute its trajectory and transmit to all units. Battery 65, prepare to fire!"

"Guess that's a yes," Asuka said to Rei, now sounding almost nervous. "Tougher than it looks." More fires were flaring up in its path; its legs were blackening with soot.

"Should we change the plan?" Shinji asked. "Rei's going to be too much of a target without even a weapon."

"No," said Rei.

"Hmm?"

"I won't be a target," she clarified. "If its AT Field is suppressed, it will prioritise immediate threats over allowing its field to recover." She paused. "We may swap places, if you like."

On the screen, a barrage of explosions rippled across the Angel and surrounding countryside. A moment later, the camera tracked over to a large fire, wreathed in smoke and ammo explosions. The words 'Battery 65: destroyed' flashed, before the camera tracked back.

"I," said Shinji, considering it. Rei might have been wrong; and he had a higher synch ratio and stronger AT Field, so he'd endure its counterattack better; but he'd also be better able to cancel its AT Field and let Asuka finish it.

"Stick to your positions," Asuka interrupted. "Third, you're a better shot. Just make sure you open up as soon as she moves, and don't give it an opportunity to focus on her. We'll see how well it can aim when an Eva's machine-gunning it in the face. Continuous fire, not burst, until I'm close enough. You don't need to be accurate anyway. Just so long as you don't get me instead."

"Fifteen seconds to drop," Misato reported. The pilots reactivated their Units, and their five-minute timers resumed counting down.

From the air, they could see fires spreading in the Angel's wake. Firefighting teams were slowly converging.

"We'll probably have to help put those out after," Asuka mused. "How boring."

The Angel apparently wasn't interested in blasting down the planes buzzing overhead, now that the bombing had stopped; there were still half a dozen spotlights and cameras following it. It didn't notice as the Evas crashed to earth and inserted their power cables, either.

"Ready," Rei whispered, staying very still.

Shinji landed a few hundred metres left of her. He moved backward to crouch behind a copse of trees, and levelled his gun. "Ready."

Sneaking was difficult at best in a bright red machine sixty metres high that weighed around five thousand tons, but Asuka still gave it a try. She kept low and moved to the outer edges of the glow from the fires trailing the Angel, toward its left, where it had fewer arms. "Ready."

The Angel still hadn't responded to any of them. From this close, they could hear it breathing, a horrible wheezing noise like a dying asthmatic, as loud as a jet engine.

"On three," Misato ordered. "Two … one … go!"

In unison, Rei raised her hands and AT Field, and Shinji pulled the trigger. His hands jerked with the recoil; a moment later, there was a flash, and a lance of energy spattered against his armour, pitting and burning through it. He cried out and dived to the side, dropping his gun.

"Ikari!" Rei cried, half-turning toward him.

"Hey!" Asuka snapped, as the Angel's AT Field began filling in. She twirled her glaive, slicing it back open; it took a swipe at her with two hands, much faster than she'd expected, raking her armour. She swore in German and brought her blade down in a brutal chop, severing one hand. Its eye sockets flashed again, and a plane of energy shot cleanly through her own wrist. "Aah!"

"Oh, you clever thing," Ritsuko murmured.

Asuka staggered back, then ran around to the Angel's side and threw her glaive into its thigh. Its head tracked her, flashed, and blasted a hole through her own leg.

"Asuka!" Misato cried. "Retreat! Everyone, fall back!"

…

The three pilots, Misato, Ritsuko, and the three senior techs sat around a conference room. Asuka's and Shinji's plugsuits were extra-pressurised, around her wrist and thigh and his chest, mimicking bandages for psychosomatic purposes. Asuka walked with a limp and could only use her left hand; Shinji was reduced to shallow breaths. Ritsuko assured them that it should wear off within a few hours, as their nervous systems rebooted and remembered the difference between their real bodies and the Evas.

"The target appears to have a super-elastic AT Field," Ritsuko explained. "Whenever anything attempts to damage it, that energy is duplicated and stored in its field, and then automatically released at whatever attacked it. It's apparently intelligent enough to know what launched an attack from a distance, as with the bombers and artillery. I'm therefore reluctant to allow an N2 strike on it.

"On top of this, it has nine limbs, and it can regenerate them quickly." She opened the recorded footage so for from one camera on her laptop, which was plugged into a projector, and jumped around to show the severed stump lengthening, then fissioning into two then three then five digits and sharpening to points. "It would be difficult for an Eva to attack its core without first disabling most of the arms; but we can't effectively do that without disabling your Evas at the same time."

"Is there any way to make it miss with its retaliatory attacks?" Misato asked. "Hit it with conventional weapons at the same time, hope it targets the wrong source?"

"That would be optimistic," Ritsuko said. "It doesn't have eyes, and it seems to understand indirect fire."

"Could we have one Eva ambush it from below? Dig out a hollow, cover it with sand …?"

"Bad idea," said Asuka. "It's too fast. It'd be seven of its hands against two of ours. Or one of mine," she added darkly. Unit-02's right hand was still out there; teams were out there protecting it from the fires, and hopefully it would be recovered intact after the Angel was dead.

"And the pilot wouldn't be able to eject if they were lying on their back," Ritsuko pointed out.

"What if one of us climbed onto its back?" Shinji suggested. He stiffened as everyone turned to him. "I mean. Its core is in its neck, right? I could reach around and stab it from behind, and it wouldn't be able to reach me."

"The back isn't quite as big a blind spot as it looks," said Misato. "Ritz?"

Ritsuko backtracked and rolled the footage. A VTOL hovered behind the Angel and opened fire with a minigun. The bullets splashed off the AT Field; the Angel's head rotated a hundred and eighty degrees, and the VTOL exploded.

"That's also assuming that its elbows work the same way humans' do," Ritsuko noted, "that it can't effectively reach behind itself. In a best case scenario, Magi predicts an 83% chance that the Unit would be disabled or destroyed without silencing the target."

"Do we have any better options?" Misato asked.

There was silence.

Rei's eyes slid from her to Shinji. "You said you were unwilling to use an N2 mine because of the risk that its field would redirect the damage to Central Dogma," she said, in her half-whisper voice. "That would not be an issue if it were delivered by an Evangelion."

"Well, not for us command crew, no," Ritsuko granted, "but then the Evangelion would be hit by the explosion, point-blank, with its AT Field down." She paused, then pulled up some highly classified schematics. "Although an Eva could theoretically endure a low-yield mine, if it hit the heavy chest armour plating. But a low-yield mine might not be enough to destroy the core … oh. Rei, you're a genius."

Rei and Shinji blinked in surprise. Asuka gaped.

Ritsuko typed up a simulation and ran it. It showed a wireframe of an Eva on the Angel's back with a bomb under the Angel. Then there was a feedback loop and everything turned to static.

"The explosion goes into the AT Field," Ritsuko explained, running it again frame-by-frame. "It's then duplicated and redirected to the Eva. Half the explosion hits the Eva; the other half hits the Angel and goes into its AT Field. This is then redirected back to the core. The same energy is duplicated near the Eva; half again goes into the AT Field."

Shinji blinked. "So … there's an … infinite number of explosions?"

"It's a convergent series," Asuka said, beaming that she had an opportunity to show off what she had learnt in college. "In total, the Angel is exposed to three times the bomb's energy, whereas the Eva only suffers one bomb's worth."

"Well, not exactly," Ritsuko said, ignoring Asuka's sour expression. "One of those three is delivered to the Angel's back, which won't affect the core, and destructive interference effects and energy losses would reduce the rest to about one point nine times … but there is a multiplier effect, yes. It should theoretically be possible to tune the magnitude of the bomb to be large enough to silence the target without destroying the Eva. Especially if we applied the P-type armour to that Unit."

"Um," said Makoto, raising a hand nervously. "That still means someone is going to have an N2 mine explode in their face."

There was an uneasy pause.

"I owe this thing one," said Asuka, waving her limp hand around. "Besides, that's no worse than diving into a magma pool, is it?"

"Yes, actually," said Ritsuko, "by several orders of magnitude."

"Vetoed," said Misato. "Asuka, your Unit is damaged. Have you ever ridden a mechanical bull? Scratch that, have you ever ridden one with one hand, while that hand is busy holding onto a bomb that could level a small town and the bull is shooting eye lasers at you?"

Ritsuko made a mental note to recommend a cap on the number of hours the Major was allowed to work per week.

Asuka glared and folded her arms. "I'm the top pilot. I can still do it."

Misato thought about this. It was obviously a bad idea and Asuka obviously knew this, but she was proud enough that she'd demand to do it anyway and then sulk when Misato overrode her.

She caught Ritsuko's eye and gave a thumbs-up behind her hips, angled such that Asuka couldn't see. "Would there be any additional risk to exposing a damaged Unit to the explosion?"

Ritsuko had a simple program which output a string of random numbers to a terminal, which she had written as an undergrad for when she wanted to show off to someone reading over her shoulder but couldn't be bothered doing any actual work. She ran it now. "The thermal and overpressure waves could sear the arm stump and permanently damage the nerve connections. There's a 56% chance we wouldn't be able to reattach the hand at all. And 34% that the pilot would suffer long-term psycho-somatic damage, including paralysis."

"Eh?" said Asuka, paling. "Make Shinji do it!"

"Wait, what," Shinji said.

"That's specifically if there's pre-existing damage," Ritsuko added. "You'd be fine."

"Doctor," Rei said softly. "Unit-01 was damaged. Four energy blasts to the chest armour."

Ritsuko looked Rei over with interest. She'd volunteered suggestions twice now. Something to think about later. "Not a problem. The armour was hot-swapped out, and the underlying damage was nominal."

"It will be dangerous," Misato said to Shinji. "I'm not going to order you to do this."

There was a blip on Ritsuko's computer. "Three hours before the Angel reaches Tokyo-3; two hours before the city is within an N2 mine's blast radius," she reported.

Shinji glanced at Rei and swallowed. "I'll do it," he said.

Asuka frowned. Rei remained impassive, as always.

…

Asuka looked anxiously down at her Eva's severed wrist. It was bound in bandages made of what looked like regular linen. Dr Akagi had said something about sympathetic reactions when she'd asked why they didn't put something tougher such as plate steel over it, let alone any of Nerv's high-tech composite armours; it was alarmingly obvious that the older woman was lying, and Asuka didn't like to think about what that implied.

In her remaining hand, she hefted their latest improvised weapon, which Misato called a custom-built Eva-sized bola, and which Asuka called two scrapped trucks welded to opposite ends of a long steel cable. A small pile of spares lay at her feet; Rei had more, and Shinji had one. The theory was that if they entangled the Angel's limbs, they might be able to restrain it for at least a few seconds without giving it enough energy to counterattack the Evas, and buy Shinji enough time to place the mine. Asuka swung her chained trucks around in circles, before deciding on a more direct outlet for her pre-battle jitters.

"Scared, Third?" she asked.

He obviously was. He had sat his Eva down and was examining the deadly little cylinder in his left fist. There was a world of difference between a scientist assuring him that he would be perfectly fine with the heavy armour protecting him, and actually voluntarily setting the bomb off. "I'm fine."

"Because if it were me, I would be. Maybe not scared scared, but at least a little nervous, you know?"

They were sitting or standing at the base of a lightly wooded valley, where the explosion would be relatively contained and which Magi predicted the Angel would walk through in a minute or so. They could already see the thick smoke above and behind it, illuminated from below by the spot fires. Asuka was on the left, Rei on the right.

"I'm fine," Shinji said again, but there was doubt in his voice.

She scoffed. "Maybe we should wrap you in that heavy armour every time. Although it might make it hard if you wanted to run away."

Misato's scowling face appeared in her HUD. "Give it a rest, Asuka," she said. "The target's coming. Shinji, how does it feel?"

He got to his feet and took a few steps. He was much more ponderous than usual. "Hard to move," he admitted. "Like … like walking around with pillows under your clothes." The armour was mostly some sort of composite which added a lot to the bulk, with a mixture of overlapping plates and flexible polymers around the joints; Misato said it was one of the many equipment modifications which they kept at HQ 'just in case'. When Asuka had asked why they even had something which would slow them down so much in a fight, Misato had replied that it was the same kind of overpreparation that had allowed Asuka to fight the eighth and survive.

"You don't need to hit it," Misato reassured him. "Let the other pilots immobilise it and just get into position."

"Here he comes," said Asuka.

The great seven-armed Angel peaked the hill and began crawling down. At its touch, the undergrowth burst into flame. It had been going on a course slightly between Rei and Shinji; it turned slightly, directly toward Shinji. Asuka had the distinct impression that its eye sockets were just weapons, that it couldn't actually see, and just felt around by echolocation or sensing air currents or something; she couldn't begin to imagine how the world appeared to a monster like that.

"How long before it's low enough?" Shinji asked, nervously bouncing on the balls of his feet and uprooting a few small trees without noticing.

"Six seconds," Ritsuko reported. "Four, three, two, one, go."

Asuka and Rei swung their truck-bolas and threw them; they spun and wrapped around the Angel's arms. Shinji spun his, a moment later, and threw; it wrapped around the Angel's neck. Its eye sockets locked with him, and he felt a tightness around his own neck.

"Ghk!"

"Idiot!" Asuka snapped, twirling a second bola, and a third. "Go! That's the only way to stop it!"

The Angel braced itself with its two foremost arms. With its other two left hands, it grabbed one of Rei's cables and pulled; the steel softened, warped, and snapped. With two of its right hands, it began tearing off Asuka's bolas. With the last, it seized Shinji by the shin and threw him off balance.

"Aah!"

Asuka took up her last bola and swung it like a whip around the offending wrist, trying to pull it free; unfortunately, she didn't break its grip, and only pulled Shinji further off-balance. Another of its hands groped at her chest; she felt her temperature shoot up, and wrenched away in pain, staggering on her bad leg. More hands grasped at Shinji, and threw him over the Angel's shoulder; the N2 mine flew out of his hand, and he landed in the burning forest.

"Ikari!" someone cried.

"Pilot's synchrograph is plummeting," Makoto read out. "24% … thirteen … it's fallen below the absolute borderline! He's fallen unconscious!"

"Idiot," Asuka muttered. "Misato, what now?"

"Life signs are stable," Maya reported.

"The P-type armour is fireproof," Ritsuko said. "He'll survive where he is."

"Alright," said Misato. "Rei, Asuka, fall back. We'll – Rei, what are you –"

The blue Eva had run off without explanation. At this last, she turned around, and Asuka and the bridge could see that she'd picked up the N2 mine.

"Soryu," she whispered. "Escape."

"You're insane," Asuka said flatly, and Rei charged.

Asuka took a moment to size up the situation. The Angel had thrown off the last of the steel cables and trucks. Bits of twisted slag littered the ground around it. It had three limbs on Rei's side, all free. She didn't have a chance.

Ignoring her damaged leg, Asuka sprinted in front of the Angel, turned sharply, and body-slammed it. It caught her with its front-left arm, but she had enough momentum to plough forward and land over the next two, pinning that side down. They flipped over to paw at her; she felt the LCL sizzle around her chest, hip, and leg.

"Go!" she shrieked.

Rei vaulted over the red Eva and wrapped her legs around the Angel. She leant forward and shoved the N2 mine under the Angel's neck.

"Wait, but can Unit-00's armour take the blast?" Maya asked.

Without waiting for an answer, Rei hit the trigger, and the world turned to pure light.